Conclusion: La vie après la mort?

This concluding chapter summarises the ways in which Cocteau employs word, image, metaphor, and myth to give form and beauty to those ideas that eternally fascinated him: love, imagination, suffering, and consolation. Cocteau shows us that to love, to imagine, to suffer, and to be consoled is to share some affinity with the Other, whether it be with those who also recognise that their attributes are deep rooted in the architecture of the world around them, or whether it be with the transcendental signifiers that seem to underpin every age while simultaneously eluding it. Ultimately, he shows us that one lives among things that were here long before we were born and will be here long after one has died. Cocteau understood that life’s true meaning and purpose transcends the age in which it is lived. True immortality involves an ascension to a realm over which even the poet cannot reign supreme. For Cocteau, life cannot be fully realised until one has the humility to accept that one is part of something greater, and we are who we are, not in spite of, but because of our relationship with the vast universe surrounding us.